When NetBSD and FreeBSD swap out a page from a process, they look in the process virtual address space to find nearby pages that are also candidates for being swapped out. This greatly increases the chance of swapin IO pulling in related data, reducing the number of disk seeks involved in swap IO.
It would be good if somebody could implement this functionality in Linux.
The FreeBSD code that implements swapout clustering is in [http://fxr.watson.org/fxr/source/vm/vm_pageout.c#L312 vm/vm_pageout.c]. On Linux it will need to be slightly different due to the fact that Linux does not have BSD style VM objects.
For bonus points, keep track of how many of the swapped in pages actually get used and dynamically vary the IO clustering size for swapin. Maybe even have swapin readahead on a per-VMA basis.
Interested in implementing this feature? Go to #mm on irc.oftc.net or claim the feature on the KernelProjects page.
Since there are multiple sub-features that can be implemented, there could be enough work for multiple small projects or one large project.